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Dreams 06
Russell You walk through campus, greeting fellow professors and students walking through the drifting bright autumn foliage. In class, the students are particularly attentive as you regale them with the tales of distant lands and foreign peoples. Returning to your office, you stop off in the village in western China where you started your career, studying the culture and language drift of those so far from the urbanised coast. Fa-sien, the elder, walks off with you to Tanzania, discussing your work cataloguing the transition from Aasa to Maasai. Sankale guides you off into the thick forest, where your Bantu contact Nuagobe is waiting to ask you about life back in the States. You walk with him, and soon realise you are in a clearing, in a village you don't recognise, with no one around, and an eerie silence pervading the buildings as night falls, bringing darkness, and deeper sleep. Matheson The trek has been difficult, but only you seem to see the true danger of this jungle. Every morning, when the camp wakes and begins to disassemble, you are the only one who notices what was missing from the night before. At first it was the radio, gone, with no one remarking. Then the telegraph. Buttons, zippers, and gabardine gave way to loosely woven cotton, and even the tents and sleeping bags became poorly cured leather. The guns of the party regressed, becoming larger, bulkier, less reliable, until they became bows, and then spears. Every day, the party loses these tools, and acts as if it were always the case. You have tried to hoard things- canned goods, cartridges, a lighter, and they have become cured meat, a sharp stone, and flint. The rest of the tribe ignores your tirades, and has begun to shun you. Every night you sleep by the fire, wondering when even that will be lost. Lynch You jerk awake to the sounds of chaos. The camp is aflame, people running around in disorder, with only the occasional sound of gunfire around the perimeter. You see Sykes and one of the Sorensen brothers running to the cover of a tree and setting up firing positions. You follow, and are just in time to see Sorensen pulled suddenly into the darkness, and Sykes' torso erupt in slow motion into a fountain of blood and gore. Scrambling away, you fire again and again into the twisting shadows of the jungle, not sure if you are actually hitting anything. You back up into a corner made by two fallen trunks, desperately searching for a target. A sudden warning causes you to look up, barely registering a dark mass enveloping you with a gurgling sound as you are ripped up and away, jerking you awake for the second time. You don't think you screamed loud enough to wake anyone. XianQi Every day, every mile, the illnesses grow worse. You have tried all your tricks, tools, and herbs. You have examined the local plants for any efficacious treatments, and still there is no improvement. Your teachers from China line the camp, muttering and judging you as you pace the ranks of your patients. You have seen many dark things during your training, but this jungle seems to be not just living, but directed with an intelligent animosity towards all those who intrude, sapping their strength, their will, their health, and ultimately their souls as they perish in this evil paradise. Your teachers walk forward, pulling the jungle in behind them, covering the dying and the dead with fresh undergrowth and animal cries. They walk to you, with flames in their eyes and pointed accusations on their lips until you are surrounded, and then trapped within the bulk of a great tree, pinioned and unable to move, or even breathe. You dissolve into the darkness, waking with labored breaths. Grey You are in your childhood home, but it is so much larger than you recall. You search through the rooms, always hearing your father's voice in the distance. Your mother is cooking, your siblings playing in the library, friends having discussions, and starting up a game of croquet. You wander through the changing halls, flinging open doors, running faster and faster, catching no more than glimpses of his familiar jacket, whiffs of his pipe. You collapse in a doorway, nearly weeping by how close you feel to finding him at last. Category:Dreams Log